A couple of days later, another couple of cuts at the data, and this time I can remove the question mark from the title. U.S. reported new COVID-19 cases are rising.
Data source for this and other graphs of new case counts: Calculated from The New York Times. (2021). Coronavirus (Covid-19) Data in the United States. Retrieved 12/9/2022, from https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.” The NY Times U.S. tracking page may be found at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html
For context, here’s how (what may or may not be the start of) this year’s winter wave is shaping up compared to those of prior years. With 20-20 hindsight, maybe this isn’t even late, compared to last year.
There’s a lot to be said about the quality of these numbers. None of it is good. Let me briefly discuss.
Data discussion
First, this isn’t an artifact of my methods. CDC has switched to weekly updates, and as of this last update (from yesterday?), they too are showing a big uptick.
Second, I can only assume that you’re not hearing about this because the CDC is now on a weekly update schedule. Reporters will have to look at that last weekly blip and decide whether that’s just a blip — just a bit of reporting noise, say, from Thanksgiving — or whether that’s the new trend. It won’t be until next week, with (what I expect to be) an even taller bar, that you would be on solid ground suggesting that a winter wave has started.
Third, my numbers jump around a lot from day to day, owing to the spotty data reporting by the states. I should note that even the recent historical numbers will jump, as my extrapolated data gets replaced by actual new information from the states. So you can’t directly compare this chart to the chart I put out two days ago. All the old numbers got revised upward in the interim.
But, what I think is telling is that when those revisions occur now, the old numbers jump up quite a bit. That’s exactly what I’d expect if there’s a fairly strong underlying upward trend. For the majority of states, you’re seeing a week’s worth of that trend-above-baseline getting reported in a single day.
That said, to me, some of those increases look far too abrupt to be entirely real. Two regions of the country saw a 50% increase in cases, in the past week? I doubt that. Likely we’re looking, in part, at some interaction between unexpected data reporting and an algorithm that can’t quite deal with that. I expect that all to settle out as the season progresses.
I should note in passing that the low South Atlantic number in the first chart is due entirely to Florida, which has yet again done something so screwy with its data reporting that my algorithm can’t handle it. My algorithm now shows cases trailing off toward nothing there, which means they must not have reported new data in quite some time. Same old same old. When they report, the South Atlantic number is going to jump up. This is an example of what I mean by poor data quality.
Finally, I can’t dismiss this is being, in part, an artifact of flu season, which is now in full swing across the entire U.S. Plausibly, that’s bringing a bunch of people with flu-like symptoms into contact with the health care system. People who would not otherwise think to see the physician for “a cold”, absent this intense flu season. And of those, some will actually be found to have COVID. I have no idea whether or not this matters, or for that matter, whether it’s even a real phenomenon.
